Dave Cross posted a photo:

via Instagram instagr.am/p/CmyT_MSNR3-/

Dave Cross posted a photo:

via Instagram instagr.am/p/Cmv4y1eNiPn/

Dave Cross posted a photo:

via Instagram instagr.am/p/Cmv4rUAta58/

Dave Cross posted a photo:

via Instagram instagr.am/p/Cmq759NtKtE/

ChatGPT exposes an API, but there’s no CPAN module for taking advantage of that. Let’s put that right (with help from ChatGPT)…

---

Write a Perl CPAN module for connecting to a ChatGPT server

To create a Perl CPAN module for connecting to a ChatGPT server, you will need to have Perl and the necessary dependencies installed on your system.

To begin, create a new directory for your module and create a file called “ChatGPT.pm” with the following content:

package ChatGPT;

use strict;
use warnings;

use Net::WebSocket::Client;
use Net::WebSocket::Server;
use HTTP::Async;

sub new {
  my ($class, %params) = @_;
  my $self = {
    host => $params{host},
    port => $params{port},
  };

  bless $self, $class;

  return $self;
}

sub send_prompt {
  my ($self, $prompt) = @_;

  my $http = HTTP::Async->new;
  my $client = Net::WebSocket::Client->new(
    url => "ws://$self->{host}:$self->{port}"
  );

  $client->connect;
  $client->send_utf8($prompt);

  my $response = $client->recv;

  $client->disconnect;

  return $response;
}

1;

To use this module in your Perl code, you can create a new ChatGPT object and call the send_prompt method like this:

use ChatGPT;

my $chatgpt = ChatGPT->new(host => 'localhost', port => 8080);
my $response = $chatgpt->send_prompt('What is your name?');
print "Response: $response\n";

This will send the text prompt “What is your name?” to the ChatGPT server running on localhost at port 8080, and print the response to the console.

Note: This is just a basic example of how you can create a Perl CPAN module for connecting to a ChatGPT server. There are many other features and considerations that you may want to add to your module, such as error handling and customization options.

To make your module available on CPAN, you will need to follow the guidelines for creating and distributing CPAN modules, which can be found in the Perl documentation and online resources.

Use Moose to create the class

To use Moose to create the ChatGPT class, you will need to have Moose installed on your system. You can install Moose by running the following command:

cpanm Moose

With Moose installed, you can modify the class like this:

package ChatGPT;

use Moose;
use Net::WebSocket::Client;
use Net::WebSocket::Server;
use HTTP::Async;

has host => (
  is => 'ro',
  isa => 'Str',
  required => 1,
);

has port => (
  is => 'ro',
  isa => 'Int', required => 1,
);

sub send_prompt {
  my ($self, $prompt) = @_;

  my $http = HTTP::Async->new;
  my $client = Net::WebSocket::Client->new(
    url => "ws://$self->{host}:$self->{port}"
  );

  $client->connect; $client->send_utf8($prompt);
  my $response = $client->recv;
  $client->disconnect;

  return $response;
}

1;

In this version of the class, the host and port attributes are defined using Moose’s has keyword. These attributes are required and must be specified when creating a new ChatGPT object. The send_prompt method is unchanged from the previous example.

To create a new ChatGPT object, you can use the new method provided by Moose like this:

use ChatGPT;

my $chatgpt = ChatGPT->new(host => 'localhost', port => 8080);

my $response = $chatgpt->send_prompt('What is your name?');

print "Response: $response\n";

This will create a new ChatGPT object with the specified host and port attributes, and send the text prompt “What is your name?” to the ChatGPT server running on localhost at port 8080. The response will be printed to the console.

Note: This is just one way to use Moose to create the ChatGPT class. There are many other features and customization options available in Moose that you may want to consider adding to your class, such as type constraints, default values, and methods.

Call the class WebService::ChatGPT

To rename the ChatGPT class to WebService::ChatGPT, you will need to update the package name at the top of the file and update the use statements to refer to the new package name.

Here is how you can update the ChatGPT class to use the new package name:

package WebService::ChatGPT;

use Moose;
use Net::WebSocket::Client;
use Net::WebSocket::Server;

use HTTP::Async;

has host => (
  is => 'ro',
  isa => 'Str',
  required => 1,
);

has port => (
  is => 'ro',
  isa => 'Int',
  required => 1,
);

sub send_prompt {
  my ($self, $prompt) = @_;

  my $http = HTTP::Async->new;
  my $client = Net::WebSocket::Client->new(
    url => "ws://$self->{host}:$self->{port}"
  );

  $client->connect; $client->send_utf8($prompt);
  my $response = $client->recv;
  $client->disconnect;

  return $response;
}

1;

With these changes, the class is now called WebService::ChatGPT and can be used like this:

use WebService::ChatGPT;

my $chatgpt = WebService::ChatGPT->new(host => 'localhost', port => 8080);

my $response = $chatgpt->send_prompt('What is your name?');
print "Response: $response\n";

This will create a new WebService::ChatGPT object with the specified host and port attributes, and send the text prompt “What is your name?” to the ChatGPT server running on localhost at port 8080. The response will be printed to the console.,/p>

Note: This is just one way to rename the ChatGPT class to WebService::ChatGPT. You may also need to update any other references to the class name in your code and documentation, as well as update the module file name and directory structure to reflect the new package name.

Suggest some tests using the standard Perl testing framework

Here are some examples of tests that you could write for the WebService::ChatGPT module using the standard Perl testing framework (Test::More):

use Test::More;
use WebService::ChatGPT;

# Test creating a new ChatGPT object
my $chatgpt = WebService::ChatGPT->new(host => 'localhost', port => 8080);
isa_ok($chatgpt, 'WebService::ChatGPT', 'Object is a ChatGPT');

# Test sending a prompt and receiving a response
my $response = $chatgpt->send_prompt('What is your name?');
is($response, 'My name is ChatGPT.', 'Response is correct');

# Test sending an invalid prompt
eval { $chatgpt->send_prompt('') };
like($@, qr/Invalid prompt/, 'Invalid prompt error is thrown');

done_testing();

The first test uses the isa_ok function to check that the object created by the new method is an instance of the WebService::ChatGPT class.

The second test uses the is function to compare the expected response to the actual response returned by the send_prompt method.

The third test uses the eval function to catch any exceptions thrown by the send_prompt method when an invalid prompt is provided, and the like function to check that the exception message matches the expected error message.

These tests can be run using the prove command:

prove -l t/chatgpt.t

---

I haven’t uploaded it to CPAN yet. Do you think I should?

The post Writing a CPAN module that talks to ChatGPT appeared first on Perl Hacks.

Dave Cross posted a photo:

via Instagram instagr.am/p/CmOfgfLtwL_/

Using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate blog posts can be bad for search engine optimization (SEO) for several reasons.

First and foremost, AI-generated content is often low quality and lacks the depth and substance that search engines look for when ranking content. Because AI algorithms are not capable of understanding the nuances and complexities of human language, the content they produce is often generic, repetitive, and lacks originality. This can make it difficult for search engines to understand the context and relevance of the content, which can negatively impact its ranking.

Additionally, AI-generated content is often not well-written or structured, which can make it difficult for readers to understand and engage with. This can lead to a high bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave a website after only viewing one page), which can also hurt the website’s ranking.

Furthermore, AI-generated content is often not aligned with the website’s overall content strategy and goals. Because AI algorithms are not capable of understanding the website’s target audience, brand voice, and core messaging, the content they produce may not be relevant or useful to the website’s visitors. This can lead to a poor user experience, which can also hurt the website’s ranking.

Another issue with AI-generated content is that it can be seen as spammy or low quality by both search engines and readers. Because AI-generated content is often produced in large quantities and lacks originality, it can be seen as an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or trick readers into engaging with the website. This can lead to the website being penalized by search engines or losing the trust and loyalty of its visitors.

In conclusion, using AI to generate blog posts can be bad for SEO for several reasons. AI-generated content is often low quality, poorly written, and not aligned with the website’s content strategy. It can also be seen as spammy or low quality by both search engines and readers, which can hurt the website’s ranking and reputation. It is important for websites to prioritize creating high-quality, original, and relevant content to improve their SEO and provide a positive user experience.

[This post was generated using ChatGPT]

The post 5 Reasons Why Using AI to Generate Blog Posts Can Destroy Your SEO appeared first on Davblog.

I’ve been building Docker containers again. And I think you’ll find this one a little more useful than the Perlanet one I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.

Several years ago I got into Travis CI and set up lots of my GitHub repos so they automatically ran the tests each time I committed to the repo. Later on, I also worked out how to tie those test runs into Coveralls.io so I got pretty graphs of how my test coverage was looking. I gave a talk about what I had done.

But two things changed.

Firstly, Travis CI got too popular and, eventually, removed their free service. And, secondly, GitHub Actions was introduced. Over the last few years, I’ve set up many of my repos to use GitHub Actions for CI. But, basically because I’m lazy, I didn’t remove the Travis CI configuration from those repos.

But last week I decided the time was right to start work on that. And when I went to remove the .travis.yml I realised that something was missing from my GitHub Actions CI workflows – they were running the unit tests, but they weren’t reporting on test coverage. So it was time to fix that.

I needed to reimplement the logic that connected Travis CI to Coveralls.io in a GitHub workflow. That actually turned out to be pretty simple. There’s a CPAN module called Devel::Cover::Report::Coveralls which takes the output from Devel::Cover, converts it to the correct format and sends it to Coveralls.io. And, as a bonus, it has documentation showing how to implement that in a GitHub workflow.

So I hacked at my workflow definition file for one of my CPAN modules and within a few minutes I had it working.

Well, I say “a few minutes”, but it took over thirteen minutes to run. It turns out that Devel::Cover::Report::Coveralls is a pretty heavyweight module and needs to install a lot of other modules in order to do its work.

At this point, you can probably guess where this is going. And you’d be right.

I’ve created a Docker container that has Devel::Cover::Report::Coveralls already installed. And, obviously, it’s available for everyone to use from the Docker hub – davorg/perl-coveralls.

A couple of small adjustments to my GitHub workflow and the coverage job is now running on my new container – and takes 29 seconds instead of 13 minutes. So that’s a win.

The relevant section of my workflow file is here:

coverage:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    container: davorg/perl-coveralls:latest
    name: Test coverage
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Install modules
        run: cpanm -n --installdeps .
      - name: Coverage
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        run: cover -test -report Coveralls

And it’s producing nice graphs on Coveralls.io like the one above.

Let me know if you find it useful.

The post Containers for Coverage appeared first on Perl Hacks.

It’s October. And that means that Hacktoberfest has started. If you can get four pull requests accepted on other people’s code repositories during October then you can win a t-shirt.

In many ways, I think it’s a great idea. It encourages people to get involved in open source software. But in other ways, it can be a bit of a pain in the arse. Some people go crazy for a free t-shirt and that means you’ll almost certainly get several pull requests that aren’t really of the quality you’d hope for.

I have a particular problem that probably isn’t very common. I’ve talked before about the “semi-static” sites I run on GitHub Pages. There’s some data in a GitHub Repo and every couple of hours the system wakes up and runs some code which generates a few HTML pages and commits those HTML pages into the repo’s “/docs” directory. And – hey presto! – there’s a new version of your web site.

A good example is Planet Perl. The data is a YAML file which mostly consists of a list of web feeds. Every couple of hours we run perlanet to pull in those web feeds and build a new version of the web site containing the latest articles about Perl.

Can you see what the problem is?

The problem is that the most obvious file in the repo is the “index.html” which is the web site. So when people find that repo and want to make a small change to the web site they’ll change that “index.html” file. But that file is generated. Every few hours, any changes to that file are overwritten as a new version is created. You actually want to change “index.tt”. But that uses Template Toolkit syntax, so it’s easy enough to see why people with no Perl knowledge might want to avoid editing that.

The README file for the project explains which files you might want to change in order to make different types of changes. But people don’t read that. Or, if they do read it, they ignore the bits that they don’t like.

So I get pull requests that I have to reject because they change the wrong files.

Last year I got enough of these problematic pull requests that I decided to automate a solution. And it’s this pretty simple GitHub Workflow. It runs whenever my repo receives a pull request and looks at the files that have been changed. If that list of files includes “docs/index.html” then the PR is automatically closed with a polite message explaining what they’ve done wrong.

This makes my life easier. It’s possible it might make your life easier too.

 

The post Not that PR, thanks appeared first on Perl Hacks.

I’m a dinosaur who still believes that web feeds are a pretty neat idea. I wrote and maintain perlanet (a Perl program for aggregating web feeds into a new feed – and building a web site based on that new feed) and I use it to build a few sites on topics I’m interested in.

Last year, I worked out a way to use GitHub Actions to rebuild these sites automatically every few hours – thereby enabling me to host the sites on GitHub Pages (I still think it’s a useful technique, but I sometimes worry slightly about the large number of commits those repos have – someone at GitHub must surely notice one day!)

Yesterday, I was doing some light maintenance on one of those sites when I realised that each rebuild of these sites was taking a significant time (by which I mean four or five minutes) and started wondering if there was a way to speed them up and use less of GitHub’s resources. The problem is that Perlanet is a pretty hefty module and each rebuild was installing that module (and, therefore, dozens of other modules) on a pristine Ubuntu container.

When you say it like that, the solution is obvious.

You don’t need to run your GitHub Actions on the standard containers that GitHub supplies. You can run them on any container that’s available from any public container hosting service. So the solution was to build a Perlanet container and run the jobs using that instead. So that’s how I spent an hour or so yesterday.

Here’s the Dockerfile I ended up with:

FROM perl:latest

RUN apt-get update && \
    apt-get -y upgrade && \ 
    apt-get install -y build-essential && \
    apt-get install -y cpanminus libtidy-dev libxml++2.6-dev libhtml-tidy-perl && \
    cpanm --notest Test::Exception && \
    cpanm --notest Perlanet && \
    cpanm --notest LWP::Protocol::https

It’s (obviously) available on GitHub in case anyone wants to improve on my rather ropey knowledge of Docker.

I explicitly install Test::Exception because HTML::Tidy (one of Perlanet’s pre-requisites) needs it and I can’t work out why the standard installation procedure isn’t installing it. And while, LWP::Protocol::https is, strictly speaking, not required by Perlanet, you wouldn’t get very far on the modern web if you only accessed web feeds that are available over HTTP.

A little bit of Docker Hub set-up and the container is available for everyone to use (and rebuilt automatically whenever I commit to the repo).

It was then just a case of changing my GitHub Actions to use my container. Here’s an example of one of the commits that did that.

I realise I’m pretty late to the party here, but I think this is a useful pattern. If you have a Perl library (or, indeed, any other software) that exists to provide a service to users then it’s a great idea to provide a containerised version of that software.

And I’m happy to report that my site rebuilds have gone from 4-5 minutes to about 45 seconds.

The post Building a Perlanet Container appeared first on Perl Hacks.

‘Okay Google. Where is Antarctica?”

Children can now get answers to all their questions using smart speakers and digital voice assistants.

A few years ago, children would run to their parents or grandparents to answer their questions. But with the ascendence of voice assistants to the mainstream in recent years, many children rely more on technology than humans.

Is this a good idea?

How does it impact the children?

When children interact with people, it helps them be more thoughtful, creative, and imaginative.

When they use artificial intelligence instead, several issues come into the foreground. These include access to age-inappropriate content and increasing the possibility of being rude or unpleasant, affecting how they treat others.

As mentioned, technology has both pros and cons. There are benefits to children using these devices, including improving diction, communication, social skills, and gaining information without bothering their parents.

Many families find that smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home are useful. They use them for several functions, ranging from answering questions to setting the thermostat. Research shows that up to nine out of ten children between the ages of four and eleven in the US are regularly using smart speakers — often without parental guidance and control. So, what is the best approach for a parent to take?

Children up to seven years old can find it challenging to differentiate between humans and devices, and this can lead to one of the biggest dangers. If the device fulfils their requests through rude behaviour, children may behave similarly to other humans.

Do Parents Think Smart Devices Should Encourage Polite Conversations?

Most parents consider it essential that smart devices should encourage polite conversations as a part of nurturing good habits in children. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood or CCFA is a US coalition of concerned parents, healthcare professionals, and educators. Recently, CCFA protested against Amazon Echo Dot Kids Edition, stating that it may affect children’s wellbeing. Because of this, they requested parents avoid buying Amazon Echo.

However, in reality, these smart devices have improved a lot and focus on encouraging polite conversations with children. It is all about how parents use and present these devices to their children, as these factors can influence them a lot.

But in simple terms, parents wish these devices to encourage politeness in their children. At the same time, they want their kids to understand the difference between artificial intelligence and humans while using these technological innovations.

Do Parents Think Their Children are Less Polite While Using Smart Speakers?

Many parents have seen their children behave rudely to smart speakers. Several parents have expressed their concerns through social media, blog posts and forums like Mumsnet. They fear these behaviours can impact their kids when they grow up.

A report published in Child Wise reached the conclusion that children who behave rudely to smart devices might be aggressive while they grow up, especially while dealing with other humans. It is, therefore, preferable if children use polite words while interacting with both humans and smart devices.

What Approaches Have Been Taken By Tech Companies to Address the Problem?

With interventions and rising concerns addressed by parents and health professionals, some tech companies have brought changes to virtual assistants and smart speakers.

The parental control features available in Alexa focus on training kids to be more polite. Amazon brands it as Magic Word, where the focus is on bringing positive enforcement. However, there is no penalty if children don’t speak politely. Available on Amazon Echo, this tool has added features like setting bedtimes, switching off devices, and blocking songs with explicit lyrics.

When it comes to Google Home, it has brought in a new feature called Pretty Please. Here, Google will perform an action only when children use, please. For instance, “Okay, Google. Please set the timer for 15 minutes.”

You can enable this feature through the Google Family Link, where you can find the settings for Home and Assistant. You can set these new standards for devices of your preference. Also, once you use it and figure things out, there will be no more issues in setting it up again.

These tools and their approaches are highly beneficial for kids and parents. As of now, these devices only offer basic features and limited replies. But with time, there could be technological changes that encourage children to have much more efficient and polite interactions.

George and the Smart Home

It was thinking about issues like this which led me to write my first children’s book — George and the Smart Home. In the book, George is a young boy who has problems getting the smart speakers in his house to do what he wants until he learns to be polite to them.

It is available now, as a paperback and a Kindle book, from Amazon.

Buy it from: AU / BR / CA / DE / ES / FR / IN / IT / JP / MX / NL / UK / US

The post Should Children be Polite While Using Smart Speakers? appeared first on Davblog.

author: J.J. Abrams
name: David
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/01/16
shelves: currently-reading
review:

A little later than usual, here’s my review of the gigs I saw last year.

In 2020, I saw four gigs. In 2021, I almost doubled that to seven. Obviously, we spent a lot of the year with most music venues closed, so those few gigs I saw were all in the second half of the year. Usually, I’d list my top ten gigs. This year (as last year) I’ll be listing them all. So here they are in chronological order.

• Tubular Bells at the Royal Festival Hall
  This was a strange show for several reasons. Firstly, it was advertised as commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Tubular Bells. But the album was released in 1973, so it was two years early (apparently it was the fiftieth anniversary of when Mike Oldfield started writing the piece). Secondly, Mike Oldfield wasn’t performing – but you needed to examine the publicity very carefully to work that out. And thirdly, there was a troupe of acrobats that were pointlessly leaping around the stage while the musicians played. All in all, I thought this was slightly disappointing.
• Heaven 17 at the Roundhouse
  Many of these shows were postponed from 2020. This was originally intended to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Human League album, Travelogue, but it ended but being the forty-first anniversary. But none of that mattered. This was Heaven 17 playing all of the first two Human League albums and it was absolutely wonderful. Apparently, they had invited Phil Oakey to take part, but he wasn’t interested. That’s Heaven 17 in the photo above.
• LUMP at the Scala
  LUMP is Laura Marling playing with Tunng’s Mike Lindsay. I kinda assumed that their first album was going to be a one-off, but they produced a second album in 2020. This was the first gig I’d been to in a cramped venue like the Scala for a couple of years and it all got a bit too much for me. I really didn’t enjoy the atmosphere and left during the third or fourth song. I still love the album though and I hope to build up my tolerance for gig crowds over the coming months.
• The Staves at Shepherd’s Bush Empire
  Actually, this was only two-thirds of the Staves. One of the sisters has has a baby recently and has decided to sit out tours for a couple of years. But the two remaining sisters still put on a great show.
• Laura Marling at the Roundhouse
  Given how few gigs I saw last year, it’s surprising how repetitive they were. Here’s Laura Marling again (and the Roundhouse again!) Although she has yet to match the heights of the Short Movie tour, Laura Marling is always worth seeing and this show was no exception.
• Heaven 17 at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire
  More repetition. I think the two Heaven 17 gigs were originally supposed to be several months apart, but the vagaries of the Covid scheduling changes led to them being just two months apart. This one celebrated the fortieth (actually forty-first) anniversary of Heaven 17 starting and was a glorious journey through their back catalogue. Oh, and the support was Pete Wylie, so I can finally say I’ve seen all three members of the Crucial Three live.
• Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark at Hammersmith Apollo
  OMD are just one of those bands that I see live whenever I can. I’ve now been seeing them for over forty years (since they supported Gary Numan in 1980). They have such a massive back catalogue that they can just play hit after hit for two hours. But this show was a bit different as they started by playing all of their 1981 album, Architecture and Morality. They were as good as I’ve ever seen them.

And that was 2021. What will happen in 2022? Well, I have tickets for a dozen or shows but who knows how many of them I’ll actually see? I’ve already had emails postponing the Wolf Alice and Peter Hook shows I was going to see this month. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see how the rest of the year pans out.

The post 2021 in Gigs appeared first on Davblog.

author: David Mitchell
name: David
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

Doctor Who has a new showrunner. But he’s actually an old showrunner. Is that a good idea?

Since the news broke yesterday, Doctor Who fan forums have been discussing nothing but the fact that Russell T Davies is returning as showrunner after Chris Chibnall’s regeneration special is broadcast next year. Most fans seem to be very excited by this prospect; I’m not so sure.

Before I start, I should point out that I’ve been a big fan of Russell T Davies since long before he brought Doctor Who back to our screens in 2005. I’ll always be grateful for the work he did to bring the show back and I believe that he’s responsible for some great moments in Doctor Who history.

But I’m not sure I want to see him back as the showrunner. Let me explain why I’m so out of step with most of the show’s fans.

Firstly, although I’m grateful to him for bringing the show back, he’s not my favourite showrunner. Obviously, any Doctor Who is better than no Doctor Who but there was a lot of stuff in Davies’ first run that I didn’t like. For example, He was the person who first introduced us to companions’ families, which brought a slight soap opera feel to some of the episodes. Also, I thought that he often wrote himself into a bit of a corner. This was most apparent in the end of season two-parters. There were many occasions when the first part set up a fantastic premise only to be let down by a finale that just couldn’t live up to the promise. The Stolen Earth was great; Journey’s End was terrible. Then there’s The End of Time. Again, it started off well but had verged well into the ridiculous by the end of the first part. And don’t get me started on the self-indulgent, mawkish nonsense that made up the last twenty minutes of that story — leading to the Tenth Doctor’s regeneration.

I admit, however, that my opinions on Davies’ writing are purely personal. And, because of the massive rise in popularity of the show during his tenure, many viewers see his approach as the gold standard for how the show should work. My other points are, I hope, less opinion-based.

Secondly, Doctor Who is a show that should always be moving forward. In the classic era of the show, previous Doctors and companions would reappear very rarely. When someone left the show, you knew the chances of seeing them again were very slim. When an executive producer left (we didn’t call them showrunners back then) you knew that the show would change in new and experimental ways. Sometimes the changes didn’t work; most of the time they did. Change is fundamental to the show. It’s how the show has kept going for (most of) sixty years.

The newer sections of the audience don’t seem to realise that. I constantly hear fans wanting things to go back to how things were. As soon as Rose was written out at the end of series two, there were calls for her to come back. And while series four has some pretty good stuff in it, I think that bringing Rose back was pandering to the fanbase in an unhealthy way. We now have a situation where fans expect every character who has been written out of the show to be brought back at their whim. There aren’t very many weeks that pass without me seeing someone in a Facebook group suggesting some convoluted way that David Tennant could be brought back to be the Doctor again.

The show must always move forward. It must always change. I believe that RTD knows that, so I hope that his second era in charge will be sufficiently different to his first. But I worry that fans will start asking for Tennant back as the Doctor with Billie Piper by his side. For some fans, that seems to be the only version of the show they will be happy with.

Finally, I worry about what RTD’s reappointment means for the future of the show. When Chibnall’s departure was announced, all of the news stories claimed that he and Whittaker had a “three and out agreement” between themselves and that he only ever planned to do three years running the show. That’s rather at odds with the talk of him having a five-year plan for the show when he was appointed to the role. I realise that he will have done five years in the post by the time he goes, but he will have made three seasons and a handful of specials — so I’m not sure that counts.

No, I think it’s clear that Chibnall has been hounded out of the role by that toxic sector of the fanbase that refuses to give his work on the show a decent chance. And, given that Moffat also put up with a lot of abuse from certain fans, I begin to wonder how easy it is to find someone to take over the job. Chibnall’s departure was announced at the end of July and the BBC would certainly have known about it for some time before that. But they have failed to find someone new and exciting to take over the job and I wonder if it has become a bit of a poison chalice. People want to do the job because, hey, it’s running Doctor Who! But, on the other hand, if you don’t please the fanbase (and no-one can please all of the fanbase) then you’ll be vilified online and hounded off social media. Add to that the fact that both Davies and Moffat cited insane working schedules as part of their reason for leaving and, suddenly, the job doesn’t look quite as tempting.

I have no inside information here at all, but I wonder if the reappointment of RTD was an act of desperation on the part of the BBC. We know that Chibnall is steering the show up to and including a BBC centenary special that will be broadcast in 2022. But the show’s 60th anniversary is the year after that and without a showrunner, you can’t cast a new Doctor and without a new Doctor in place pretty soon, the 60th-anniversary celebrations would seem to be in danger.

The news of the reappointment has all been very celebratory, of course, but I wonder if that’s actually the case. I wonder if the BBC’s approach to RTD was more like this:

“So, that show you resurrected back in 2005. Well, we can’t find anyone to take over as showrunner, and unless we get things moving pretty quickly we’re not going to have a 60th anniversary worth speaking off. Seriously, we’re thinking of just cancelling it… unless you can suggest something that we could do…”

This, of course, leaves RTD thinking that the only way to save his baby is to step in himself. Maybe he’s stepped in as a stop-gap until the BBC finds someone else to take over. The announcement says he’s signed on for the 60th special and following series. But that’s a bit vague (because the English language doesn’t have a plural for “series”!) so who knows how long he’ll hang around for. Time will tell, I guess.

But, if you’re one of those fans who think it’s big or clever to be unrelentingly negative about the showrunner on social media, please stop and consider whether you’re part of a problem that could end up with no-one wanting the job and the show being cancelled.

All-in-all, I wish that the BBC hadn’t done this. I would have far preferred to see the show moving forward. But if, as I suspect, the alternative was no new Doctor Who for the foreseeable future, then obviously this is a good plan. I’m keen to see what Davies has in store.

But first I’m really excited to see what Chibnall has in store for his final series and the subsequent specials. If series 13 improves on series 12 to the extent that series 12 improved on series 11, then it’s going to be great.

The post The Return of RTD appeared first on Davblog.

I’ve just upgraded my V6 box to Virgin TV 360. I’m starting to think that was a mistake.

When Liberty Global took over Virgin Media in 2013, it seemed likely that at some point in the future VM would stop using TiVo software to run its set-up boxes and switch to something based on Liberty’s Horizon platform. That something is Virgin TV 360, which was announced last year and is now being rolled out to any VM subscriber who asks for it. I asked for the upgrade last week and my new kit arrived today. I’ve been using it for a few hours and I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t.

I heard about Virgin TV 360 last year, but I haven’t been keeping up with the news, so I was somewhat surprised to see it advertised on television last week. On further investigation, I found the page about it on their website and discovered that I could order the upgrade for my account. The website upgrade path didn’t work for me, so I called them and booked the upgrade.

As I have a V6 box, I didn’t need new hardware, they just sent out a new remote control and told me that I could upgrade the software myself once the new remote arrived. That arrived this morning, so at lunchtime, I settled in to upgrade my system.

It started off smoothly. A screen warned that the upgrade could take up to half an hour, but it only took a few minutes before I was looking at the new interface.

The old TiVo interface was really showing its age and this new interface is much better. It looks pretty similar to Android TV. Gone are most of the lists of titles, replaced by tiles with pictures in them. But while the new look and feel had me smiling, my smile evaporated once I started to use it. I don’t think I was a particularly expert user of the old TiVo interface, but a lot of the functions I used to regularly use are either missing or buried so deeply in the interface that I haven’t found them yet.

A lot of the problems are around the search mechanism. Search is being pushed as the main way to interact with the new system, so it’s disappointing to see that it’s not as powerful as the old TiVo system was. It seems that the database that powers the search isn’t as sophisticated as the old one was.

The old database contained details of thousands of TV shows and films. You could search for pretty much any TV show and you could get information about it (lists of episodes, cast and crew lists, things like that). At that point, you could set a “series link” so that if that program was broadcast on any of your channels in the future, the TiVo would record it for you. There were ways to fine-tune those records — only record HD broadcasts, only record new episodes, only record season 3 onwards — things like that. The new search doesn’t do most of that. It seems to only find shows that are on in the next couple of weeks. When it finds something, you can create a series link, but it’s hard-wired to the channel that you found the program on. And none of the other fine-tunings are available.

A couple of examples might help here. On my old system, I had a series link set for “Doctor Who” on all channels. So it would record an episode of Doctor Who wherever it was broadcast. I wanted to set up something like that on the new system. I searched for “Doctor Who” and it found a few repeats that are coming up on W in the next couple of weeks. But if I used that to set up the series link, I’d miss the new season that’s being broadcast on BBC One later this year. I also wanted to set a series link for “What We Do in the Shadows”. There’s a new season of that coming at some point, but because there are no episodes being broadcast in the next couple of weeks, Virgin TV 360 knows nothing about it and I can’t create a series link.

I mentioned that the old search database had cast and crew lists. You could use those to search for people and set up automatic recordings for any show that mentioned those people. I had a dozen or so of those set up — so I’d never miss a show that featured Neil Gaiman, Alice Roberts, Gerry Anderson and many other people — but that’s not available in the new system. So that’s a whole type of use that I can no longer do.

But I think the most frustrating problem I’ve found so far is the way it renumbers channels. My Virgin Media subscription comes with over 200 channels. Many of them, I have no interest in. So the TiVo software had a “favourite channels” feature. I could mark the channels that I was interested in watching and the TV guide would give me a view that only displayed those channels. The new software also has something like that. But the new feature also has another, completely unexpected side effect. All of the channels have a three-digit number assigned. And over the many years I’ve been using Virgin Media, I’ve learned the numbers for many of the channels that I use frequently. But the new system uses my favourite channels to number the channels and that gives them new numbers that are completely confusing.

As an example, say I’ve only chosen three favourite channels — BBC One HD (108), BBC Four (107) and BBC News HD (601) — the new software actively hides the “real” channel numbers from me and, if I want to type a number on the remote to change the channel, expects me to type 1, 2 or 3. This is annoying for two reasons. Firstly, I need to memorise a whole new set of channel numbers and, secondly, those numbers will change whenever I add or remove a favourite channel. That seems like idiocy to me. Who thought that would be a useful feature?

All in all, I’m really struggling after a few hours with this new interface. I don’t think I’m usually someone who just dislikes change. I think these are real holes in the functionality that I’m missing from the old system.

I’m hoping that some of these will be fixed in future releases of the software. But I’m worried that some of them will be seen as a simplified way of doing things and, therefore, just something I’ll have to get used to.

Perhaps this won’t matter to new customers who are just joining Virgin Media. But if you’re an existing customer who likes using these powerful features, you might want to think twice before upgrading to this new system.

The post Virgin TV 360 — First impressions appeared first on Davblog.

[Update: the CPAN Request Tracker was saved. It’s now run by a new team of volunteers and none of my suggestions below are required.]

Two weeks ago, we learned that the CPAN Request Tracker was closing down early next year. I proposed a plan that CPAN authors could follow to ensure that their users can still find somewhere to report bugs in modules (and, perhaps more importantly, to see what bugs have already been reported in modules).

But that’s only part of the problem. In fact, it’s probably a minor part of the problem. If you’re an active CPAN author, then you probably already knew about the impending closure and had already made plans to deal with it. It’s likely that you had already moved your bug tracking to a new system. At the very least, you now know what the problem is and are considering the best way to deal with it before next March.

The far larger problem is the thousands of distributions that aren’t owned by active CPAN authors. What are we going to do about those?

How big is the problem? Well, the site cpan.rocks displays stats about CPAN. One of the panels on its front page shows a summary of the bugtracker information in CPAN distribution. You’ll see that 24,873 distributions (that’s 66% of them) have no bugtracker information included in their metadata. That’ll be for a number of reasons. Some of them will be distributions that haven’t been updated since alternative bugtrackers were supported by CPAN (originally, it was just assumed that everyone used the CPAN RT); some of them will be because the authors don’t know how to add the required metadata; and some of them (including most of my distributions) are missing it because the author just hasn’t got round to adding it yet. There will, of course, be many more reasons.

Some people will have read the recent news and will be galvanised into doing something about it (I fall firmly into that category) but others (and I’d suggest that it’s a large majority) either won’t hear about the change or won’t care about it. And why should they care? They were generous enough to donate some of their code to CPAN at some point. They don’t have any obligation at all to carry on maintaining it after they’ve lost interest in whatever project led to them writing that software.

Take, for example, Mail-Alias. That was released by someone called Tom Zeltwanger twenty years ago. He released three versions over a period of two months and then stopped. Who knows why. When he last updated the module, the CPAN search engine didn’t support alternative bugtrackers, so he never considered adding one. And that meant that the CPAN page for his module linked to the default bugtracker set up for the distribution on the CPAN RT. In the last fifteen years, four bugs have been reported against that module. But as Tom has moved on, nothing has been done about any of them. There are a lot of modules on CPAN in a similar situation.

But that leaves MetaCPAN (the current CPAN search engine) with a problem. Where does it send people who want to report a bug against an inactive module?

You might think that it doesn’t matter. But I disagree. Maybe I think that Mail::Alias would be the perfect module for a project I’m working on. Even before I start using it, it’s useful to be able to browse any existing bugs to see how they might affect my use of the module. And if someone later comes along and wants to take over maintenance of the module, then it’s useful for them to see any bugs that have been raised during the hiatus when the module was unmaintained.

So, I’m a big fan of having a default bugtracker for CPAN modules – even for ones with inactive authors. Which leads us to the question of where should that be. And I have a suggestion.

A few years ago, Micheal Schwern and Olaf Alders set up Gitpan. It’s an organisation which has a Github repo for every distribution on CPAN. And those repos each have a commit for every release of those distributions. Here, for example, is the repo for Mail-Alias – and you can see the three commits for the three releases I mentioned above.

So I’d like to suggest Gitpan as a suitable place to use as a default bugtracker for CPAN distributions. There are a couple of problems:

• It looks like the auto-population of the commits stopped a few years ago. We’d need to work out how that works and catch up on the recent uploads.
• None of the repos has the issue tracker turned on. But I expect that can be done with a relatively simple program that uses the GitHub API.

Of course, we also have the problem that some people object to using GitHub since it was taken over by Microsoft. But that’s fine, they can just point their bugtracker metadata to their preferred system.

The problem with the CPAN RT was that it needed too much maintenance – and the Perl NOC team is really overworked. Any self-hosted alternative seems likely to have the same problem eventually. So I’m all in favour of using a third-party alternative. And if you’re taking that route, then it makes sense (to me, at least) to use a third-party system that already has all (ok, most) of the repos set up.

I haven’t spoken to Schwern or Olaf about this, so I don’t know if there was some major problem that would stop this plan from working. But I think it’s worth looking at.

The post Replacing CPAN RT appeared first on Perl Hacks.

author: Beth Buelow
name: David
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/01/27
shelves: currently-reading
review:

Some thoughts on ways to measure the quality of Perl code (and, hence, get a basis for improving it)

How (and why) I spent 90 minutes writing a Twitterbot that tweeted the Apollo 11 mission timeline (shifted by 50 years)

A talk from the European Perl Conference 2019 (but not about Perl)

author: Lindsey Bareham
name: David
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/07/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

author: Sean Platt
name: David
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/06/24
shelves: currently-reading
review:

The slides from a half-day workshop on career development for programmers that I ran at The Perl Conference in Glasgow

A (not entirely serious) talk that I gave at the London Perl Mongers technical meeting in March 2018. It talks about how and why I build a web site listing the line of succession to the British throne back through history.